Zephyr concentrates on one train in the Amtrak system — the
California Zephyr, which makes a 51-hour run between Chicago and
Emeryville, California (just across the Bay from San Francisco). Kisor
is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and writes as a
journalist would. He describes the passengers, the route, the sights,
and the history of the areas that the train passes through. He
participates in some whimsy himself, spending a couple of hours
concocting a murder mystery set aboard a train after meeting a fellow
writer. He tells of passenger antics, of the forced camaraderie of the
assigned-seating in the diner, of the reactions to the views from the
lounge car.

Unlike Zephyr, this book approaches the subject strictly from
the passenger’s point of view. After experiencing his father’s death,
along with a failed run for mayor, Terry Pindell decided to take to the
rails. He crisscrosses the country from his starting station of
Springfield, Massachusetts, the closest major station to his home in
Keene, New Hampshire. He rides on at least a portion of every Amtrak
route, and he ends up only a few hundred miles short of riding the entire
Amtrak system. His ambition was:

"travel the entire country without ever eating in a fast-food
restaurant, spending money in a mall, driving on an interstate, or
waiting in an airport ... I wasn't looking for: the people who travel
by train ... the decision to take the extra time to travel by train
implies a certain set of worldviews and priorities ... here are two
stories: one of the historical American landscape defined by the
passenger rail routes that shaped it; the other of the people who
travel these lines today."

This is the last of three Amtrak travelogue book reviews. The first two
were on Zephyr and Making Tracks.

Here is another book which takes you around the country, but it is much
more of a personal story than the previous two travelogues. Scheer does
not seem to be a railfan, and most tidbits on locomotives or the route
network comes from railfans or Amtrak personnel that he he chats with.
After giving a brief history of Amtrak in the introduction, the book
launches right into the journey. In a way, we experience the same
disorientation that Scheer himself experienced when he boarded a train in
the middle of the night. The pattern of the book only becomes clear on
p.66:

"I was out simply to see what travel by train was like in our time in
this country, where trains have been, admittedly, so much debased
recently and are so often vilified. (Paul
Theroux has called Amtrak the worst railroad in the world, and he
should know.) My plan was to see just what sort of journey one could
have by train these days, provided only that he could pay the fare, had
a few dollars left over to arrange for shelter and food, and remained
open to whatever fortune, good or bad, turned up. Friends at every
stop are not part of the bargain ... and I made exceptions. I also
counted it in their favor if they had a washing machine."